Lynne Featherstone

I recently visited FoodCycle’s Station House Community Café . They also had celeb Thom from Channel 4’s ‘Three Hungry Boys’ . We were invited there to show our support for FoodCycle and help to reach their £5,000 target on crowdsourcing website PeopleFund.it.

The café is based at MIND in Haringey on Stapleton Hall Road. It uses surplus food and dedicated volunteers to create healthy meals for the community every Friday lunchtime, running a ‘pay what you can’ scheme so anyone can come along.

To help keep the Café running, they’re offering rewards in return for pledges on www.peoplefund.it/foodcycle including a VIP dinner for two, signed cookbooks and FoodCycle aprons and T-shirts. The Café needs £3,000 to reach the target which will help it to run for another year.

If you are interested in supporting this local good cause please visit: www.peoplefund.it/foodcycle

The campaign to push back against the relentless pressure to be a singular perfect shape and size continues. Here is my recent piece on the Government Body Confidence campaign for the Huffington Post.

This is my most recent column published in the Ham & High:

Our Parliament has come a long way in recent years. In fact, watching ‘The Iron Lady’ with Margaret Thatcher sticking out like a blue female sore thumb amongst the total male greyness of the then chamber – it reminded me of how recently in history this establishment was nearly all male.

However, despite real progress, it is still nowhere near reflecting the percentage of women in the country – and that is without even starting to talk about other aspects of diversity such as ethnicity, class or disability…

It is in everyone’s interests to have a Parliament that is made up of the best people for the job, and that includes a range of people who can best represent the diversity that exists in our communities – and who bring the benefits of a diverse set of experiences.

We do not just elect individuals, we elect people to be members of a team (their party, government/opposition, Parliament overall) – and, just as in sport, good teams have the right mix to be more than simply the sum of their parts. Good teams need variety and diversity.

We all suffer if that is missing because we end up with worse decision-making if Parliament is made up of a monochrome slice of uniformity.

There have been tremendous strides made in recent years. Whatever your views on how best to get there – Labour’s all women shortlists made a massive change in the culture of both the Labour party and parliament. The Conservatives, using a very different mechanism, have also made great strides in terms of their diversity. And we (Liberal Democrats) had worked incredibly hard on mentoring and monitoring and had succeeded in getting women in winnable seats in 2010 – but sadly we didn’t win them.

In our case we now have the Leadership Academy which will support a small, but ambitious and able cohort of under-represented groups as key candidates for the future. Winnable seats will have to have two of the graduate candidates from the Leadership Academy on their shortlists. Members will still have the final choice of course – but we will not just be sitting on our hands thinking that nothing needs doing.

I responded for the Government in the recent debate on representation in Parliament last week. The Speaker’s Conference a couple of years back made a number of recommendations – for Government, for the House and for political parties in terms of improving the diversity of their elected representatives.

Some of the recommendations have been introduced to date – including the holding of this debate s. It is legal until 2030 to employ all women shortlists if a political party wishes so to do. The Equality Act now allows us to balance our shortlists with people from under-represented groups if we wish. There is an ‘access to elected office’ plan and fund to support those with disabilities in being candidates about to be announced in detail and a raft of other measures.

What was clear from the debate – and very heart warming – was that everyone across the political divide is working hard to improve our representative quality.

Each party has its own traditions and beliefs, so each party has to find its own solutions for the shared problem we have of how unrepresentative Parliament. The political system needs to give parties the options to pick their own solutions – which it now does.

But as ever in politics – as it should be in a democracy – what matters is not only what the system permits or what politicians want, but what the public demands.

You do not have to wait until an election though. If you know someone talented, why not encourage them to get stuck into politics and stand themselves? The readers of these columns are a wonderfully diverse group – and I’m sure that the people you know and could encourage would be more diverse than the current make-up of Parliament!

Well – it’s nice to get good news to start off the year.

A poll by Liberal Democrat Voice amongst its member only forum rates how ministers have done: which four ministers have most improved their standing, who is minister of the year and who has done worst.

My column published in the Ham & High this last week:

It’s been quite a year – both in government and in the constituency. And there is no real separation between those two. The constituency is where legislation and the economy hit the street. The people who come to my advice surgery and the letters, emails and phone calls that come in from local residents at the rate of between two and four hundred per day are my reliable barometer of local peoples’ lives.

Sadly, the stand out of the local year has to be the riots, which kicked off in Tottenham and then spread – not only to Wood Green in my constituency – but across the country. The images of peoples’ lives in flames and wanton looting seared into the nations psyche. I have written about the riots, cause and effect before, but in terms of my own actions at the time – I was duty Minister at the Home Office on the Sunday. With Boris, the PM, the DPM and the Home Sec out of the country – it was down to me to go out on the airwaves to speak to the nation. And of course – locally – going to visit the traders in Wood Green who had been left for hours the night the riot kicked off without police coming to their frantic calls and then visiting Tottenham High Road with Nick Clegg on the Monday to see the devastation for ourselves, meet some of those who had suffered the consequences of the riots and all of the local partners who needed to put things in place for recovery and help and support.

More generally, as a Liberal Democrat in a coalition government, it has meant making terribly hard decisions in order to do the right thing for the nation. I would have loved to come into government like Labour did in 1997 with a flourishing economy. But the economy not only is not flourishing – but takes all we can do not to go under. So I totally support and believe that the stringent measures we have taken as a government are what is protecting us from the hideous interest rates that we see hit other countries like Italy, Greece and Ireland. If we had those interest rates – the job losses and loss of homes would be massive compared to what we are suffering now.

The economy has dominated all – and will do for some time to come. So without rehearsing a full list of Liberal Democrat achievements in government I will mention a couple of key policies delivered – both which go to the heartbeat of Liberal Democrats – fairness.

Thanks to Liberal Democrats, the coalition has taken over a million of the lowest paid out of tax altogether and put £200 back in the pockets of 23 million low and middle income earners.

Our ‘pupil premium’ (which is money that the follows the child and is awarded on the basis of deprivation), has meant that even during these tough times in Haringey we received £5.3 million extra for our schools the first year of the pupil premium. This year it has gone up to £8.8 million and this will go on rising year on year of this government. Education is the key transformative for so many children.

More personally in my government portfolio (which is Equalities and Criminal Information) I have been very fortunate to be able to commence the Equality Act (nine tenths enacted); see civil partnerships in religious premises become law; announce that the government will consult on same sex marriage next March; produced action plans on: violence against women, equalities and transgender; introduce consultations: on stalking; on widening the definition of domestic violence; on the disclosure of information about previous convictions men have of harm to women (Clare’s Law); get rid of identity cards; reduce vetting and barring back to common sense levels; ban wheel clamping on private land; set up a Body Confidence campaign group (fighting the impossible pressure of the perfect image); find some funding for male domestic violence groups; play a part in the change of the laws of accession; ensure that government messages on women’s rights (a moment in history with the Arab Spring and Afghanistan), violence against women and LGB&T rights are taken across the world by travelling ministers; play a part in the Bonn Conference on Afghanistan post 2014; tackle Homophobia and Transphobia in sport with the Sports Charter; support and pursue more women on boards, equal pay; women entrepreneurs – and a lot more – which there just isn’t room to cover in this column.

But as ever – home is where the heart is – and here in Hornsey & Wood Green there have been many,  many campaigns. Perhaps the biggest of which is fighting against plans which are supported by Labour Haringey for a massive waste plant at Pinkham Way . We have stopped them at the moment (thanks to lots of local people, Liberal Democrat Cllr Juliet Solomon and the Pinkham Way Alliance and the three local MPs) – but vigilance is key. As to Labour’s plans to make rubbish collections once every two weeks – judging from our survey – not wanted!

I have also – as always – been delighted to visit countless local people, schools, projects and events and you can always see what I am up to if you go to my website and look at the news section which covers what I do locally.

As ever, it has been an absolute honour and privilege to serve as your MP and I thank you all for your contribution in answering my emails and my surveys and for being the best constituents an MP could ever want.

Please just get in touch if ever I can be of help.

Wishing you all a very Happy 2012.

I was very proud today to launch the Government’s Advancing transgender equality: a plan for action – the first ever Government action plan to advance transgender equality.

It lays out the Government’s vision and commitment to improve transgender people’s lives. To view the action plan and our e-bulletin, please click here.

The action plan was formulated with the trans community and I would like to thank everyone who took time to speak to us, attend our events and respond to our e-surveys. All of the input, challenge and continued hard work by the community themselves have made the action plan possible.

PS  Support our campaign to tackle homophobia and transphobia in sport. Sign the Charter for Action by ‘liking’ our facebook page

You will have seen on the news the death of two young men – both who had been at dance music events at Alexandra Palace on Friday and Saturday. One other young man is in hospital in a stable condition.

The management at the Palace have put out this statement

The key point being that if you were at the Palace and took any substances and do not feel well – then please go to A& E to get checked out.

The police are investigating the incident.

GreenN8 has put together a clip with Stroud Green’s residents and LibDem politicians explaining why the Boundary Commission should leave Stroud Green in the Hornsey & Wood Green constituency and not move it into Tottenham.

Here is the film marvellously put together by Ofer: http://www.youtube.com/GreenN8TV

Myself and many others have spent years campaigning to highlight the issue of domestic violence, and so I was delighted to speak at a conference today hosted by the City of London’s City Bridge Trust, NSPCC and Refuge looking at what can be done to meet the needs of children affected by domestic violence.

There are some great services out there that support thousands of vulnerable women and children, but it is concerning that new research by the NSPCC and Refuge shows children’s views are often ignored and considered second to those of women suffering from violent abuse.

The report highlights some isolated examples of promising work in this area that we can build on, but the researchers found children can be sidelined, and some of the most vulnerable children and young people are the least likely to get help.

We must do more to tackle this issue, and ensure children as well as the women are able to access adequate support, and that children have a role in shaping the services that directly affect them. You can read my full speech from the conference here:

Introduction
Good morning. I would like to start by thanking Refuge and the NSPCC for inviting me here today and giving me an invaluable opportunity to hear from these incredible young people.

It’s easy as a Minister to get stuck in Parliament or in the Home Office, and to simply read reports and meet officials, but it is so important for me to hear first hand from the people whose lives are affected by the issues I am working hard to address.

I would like to commend the panel for having the bravery to talk about your experiences.

I was so moved to hear about your lives and the difficulties that you have overcome. It is truly humbling to stand in front of you to hear about the challenges you’ve faced, but to see that you’ve not let these stop you from moving forward.

Your voices bring this research to life and underscore its importance.

And Michelle.

I am always thrilled to meet successful business women as I’m very aware of the unique challenges they face (especially when dealing with Lord Sugar).

But your success is even more commendable in light of your own experiences as a child. It is a tribute to your character that you have not let this hold you back, and your tremendous success shows that no matter what terrible events you endure as a child, they need not define your future.
However, we cannot let these inspiring stories distract us from the reality facing so many children living with domestic violence and the important messages in your research.

Why is this report important?
As minister responsible for the Government’s action plan to end violence against women and girls, tackling domestic violence is one of my most important responsibilities and one that is always at the forefront of my mind.

The level of violence faced by women and girls continues to shock me – in the last year alone, there were over 1 million female victims of domestic abuse in England and Wales.

That’s nearly 2 women each minute – another 20 victims by the time I finish speaking. This is simply deplorable. It is a scandal and an outrage that over the course of their lifetimes a quarter of women will experience this horrific crime.
But what we forget is that these women often have children and when violence enters the family home, it enters the lives of everyone there. No one is left untouched.

Living with those 1 million victims are many more children, powerless to end the violence that surrounds them and desperate for it to stop.

Whether violence happens in the next room, directly in front of children or involves children themselves, it casts a devastating cloud over their daily lives and stops their childhood instantly.

From speaking to victims myself, I know how hard they try to shield their children from violence, to the extent that they will endanger their own lives further to protect their children.

But we are understanding more and more that when children grow up in a home tainted by violence, their development, their wellbeing and their relationships with both parents – perpetrator and victim – are all adversely affected and the damage is deep and long lasting.

We recognise in law that seeing or overhearing violence to another person in the home is potentially detrimental to children’s welfare, and, as your report identified, this is increasing the notification of domestic violence cases to children’s services. But we need to think more about quite how far reaching the impact is and how differentiated our response to children needs to be.

We know how victims in violent relationships struggle to know what they should do, but too often we don’t acknowledge the confusion felt by children trying to reconcile the image they have of a loving parent, with the violent perpetrator who destroys family life.
We often focus our efforts on moving victims and their families out of violent homes, but do we think enough about the support children need to adjust to new homes and new schools, and the new life these bring.

Listening to the stories of the young people on the panel today, I am struck by some of the particular issues you raised: services rarely open outside school hours – so you can’t access them without missing school; more promotion of sites like The Hideout – the Women’s Aid website for young peopl and the need to treat every child individually with a solution that address their needs personally.

Government strategy and action
So what are we doing? First, let me be clear – the protection of children is a priority for this government and protecting them from domestic violence is a personal priority for me.

To that end we have allocated £28 million of stable Home Office funding for specialist violence against women and girls services until 2015.

The majority of this funding is directed to local areas and is going to support independent domestic violence advisers, and multi-agency risk assessment conference co-ordinators.

Multi-Agency Risk Assessment Conference Coordinators
The key feature of Multi-Agency Risk Assessment Conferences, of which there are over 250, is that they bring together all the relevant agencies to secure the safety of high-risk domestic violence victims.

They facilitate that vital link with child-focused services, helping to ensure the needs of children are considered alongside the needs of their parents.

I was really pleased to read in your report that those areas that used these arrangements offer a better prospect of providing the comprehensive, differentiated response that children living with domestic violence need.

This year we have granted funding for 54 Multi-Agency Risk Assessment Conference coordinator posts and I hope that this will enable a more child-focused approach to domestic violence.

Independent Domestic Violence Advisers
Victims are represented at these conferences by their Independent Domestic Violence Adviser, an IDVA.

These are trained specialist who provides that crucial tailored support, focused on a family’s unique circumstances, including the effect on any children.

In some areas there are even specialist advisers for children. Blackpool, for example, has a specialist Children’s IDVA Service who provides weekly drop in sessions for young people at local high schools.

We know that these specialists play a crucial role in putting children at the heart of the discussion and having put funding toward 144 posts this year, I hope personalised support is making a difference to the lives of more families, and more children than ever before.

Police
The police also play an important part and have a statutory responsibility to safeguard and promote the welfare of children.

To strengthen this, we also amended the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill so that Police and Crime Commissioners would, rightly, have child safety as a priority.

Domestic Violence Protection Orders
We are also piloting new powers for the police in three areas – Greater Manchester, West Mercia and Wiltshire.

Domestic Violence Protection Orders address one of the key themes that you identified when talking to children – that in some cases children want to get away, and stay away, from the abuser.

These orders prevent the perpetrator from returning to a residence and from having contact with the victim for up to 28 days, for example.
They give a victim and her children immediate protection and also enable an unstable family environment to stabilise, minimising the disruption that is so damaging and helping children return to the normal life they crave.

If they prove successful, we will look to roll them out more widely.

Government funding
We know that statutory services can do all this better with the support of children’s charities, like the NSPCC.

That is why earlier this year we announced that we would award grants worth £60 million to go directly to fund the voluntary and community sector (VCS) organisations that work with children, young people, parents and families.

Over £170,000 of the grant, this year, has been awarded specifically to address the issue of domestic violence.
In addition, the Government has awarded the NSPCC a new grant totalling £11.2 million between 2011-2015 for investment in ChildLine and the NSPCC Helpline.
These services really do provide a lifeline for children trying to survive situations that, as a parent, I can barely bring myself to imagine.

MUNRO REVIEW
But we know we must do more and that our systems do not always function as we would wish them to.

Professor Eileen Munro’s review of child protection services in England showed us that the system is not working as well as it should. And this includes working with adult’s services to tackle domestic violence.

The Government has accepted Professor Munro’s fundamental argument that the child protection system has lost its focus on the things that matter most: the views and experiences of children themselves.

As I have heard today, and seen in your report, we need a fundamental shift in the way the system works.

Children should be at the centre of discussions that affect them, not cast aside and dictated to. They of all people understand best what they need and how they feel about what has happened to them.

They need to be able to talk to skilled adults themselves; they need to be the authors of their own stories.

The Government’s approach to child protection reform is therefore driven by three key principles:
• trusting skilled frontline professionals to use their own judgement;
• reducing bureaucracy and prescription;
• and, most important of all, making the system child-centred.

We need to enable professionals to focus on the needs of children and young people, so they are better protected and their welfare better promoted.

We are not seeking to impose a one size fits all approach, nor introduce a host of new procedures. We believe that local leaders with their partners should have the freedom to design and deliver services.

But we do think that however they choose to meet needs of children and young people, they must put those children and young people at the heart of the decision making process.

And to show our commitment to making this happen, and to address one the key recommendations of your research, I would like to invite all of the young people on the panel here today to come at meet with me.

What I have heard already today has been invaluable, but I’m sure it only touches the tip of the iceberg and you have much more that you would like to contribute.

Please come to the Home Office and we can continue these discussions.

This is my column from the Ham & High published last Thursday:

There was a girl I knew when I was growing up – let’s call her Joanna for the purposes of this column. We shared our growing pains from school dramas, parental clashes (hers) paternal loss (mine) and of course – boyfriend issues.

One such boyfriend turned out to be a nightmare after Joanna had ended their relationship. One night she called me, came over and in tears told me what she was going through: phone calls that never stopped – persistent following. Whenever she came out of wherever she was – he would be outside. One night I remember she called me because he was in the garden outside her flat just standing looking up at her window. She was frightened and felt hounded and abused – as if her life wasn’t her own.

Joanna’s suffering only stopped when she moved abroad. But her suffering, albeit truly dreadful, was of a different order than the experiences of the three women I met on Monday in Manchester.

I was there to launch the Coalition Government’s consultation on stalking. There I met Rachel and Kelly – victims of terrifying stalking themselves – and Sarah. Sarah’s sister Katy had ended up being murdered by her partner. There were countless incidences, police called, social services involvement, family involvement – but none of the interventions held sway. And that is the issue – that despite the fact we have the laws in place to deal with stalking – still victims feel they are being let down.

The tales told to me in Manchester were of clear threats being present and opportunities to address the harm being missed, sentences not passed, agencies not acting, police not taking the issue seriously enough, prosecutors not passing stiff enough sentences, breaches of restraining orders being virtually ignored.

In Joanna’s day (over 30 years ago) – that was just tough. The police weren’t interested and if there was no actual assault – then women (and men) just had to put up with it.

Since 1997 we have had the Protection from Harassment Act (1997). This is the law which is there to protect all of us from stalking in all its forms. The Act was drafted so that it might extend to any form of persistent conduct which causes alarm or distress. However, it doesn’t specifically mention the word stalking or cyber stalking.

Stalking and cyber stalking are included within the Act, but some campaigners and organisations in this arena believe that because the actual words are not mentioned specifically – the police do not always realise that the Act can be used to tackle stalking and fail to take the appropriate action to deal with it.

The definition used in the British Crime Survey is ‘two or more incidents (causing distress, fear or alarm) of obscene or threatening unwanted letters or phone calls, waiting or loitering around home or workplace following or watching, or interfering with or damaging personal property by any person, including a partner of family member’.

According to the British Crime Survey last year almost 1 in 25 women aged 16-59 are a victim of stalking every year. Over a lifetime, stalking affects almost one in five women and one in ten men.

Stalking is an issue which profoundly affects many lives often in the most devastating ways and it is a priority in the Government’s program to tackle violence against women and girls and is underpinned by the ‘Call to End Violence Against Women and Girls – Action Plan which you can see at www.homeoffice.govuk/vawg

Stalking removes our most basic of rights – that of feeling safe in our own skin and in control of our own life. The effect of stalking on victims’ lives can be incredibly wide-reaching. Stalking is a crime of power, control and intimidation, with victims denied the right to chose who is in their lives and who is not. It is a crime which can reach into every corner of a victim’s life and every minute of their day.

Whether it is training or attitudes for the police and other agencies, the impact of the Crown Prosecution Service guidelines or whether restraining orders are effective or not or whether it is a change in the terminology in the law or both – action is clearly needed.

That is why we need to know what more we can do to ensure that perpetrators of this crime are brought to justice and victims have support. That is why we are consulting to see what more we might be able to do.

The consultation will run for twelve weeks.